Bad Stuff Happening IC
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Like everything else, it depends.
I want bad stuff to happen to my PC, because I want stuff to happen.
But.
Is it fair? It sucks the fun right out of it when it’s shit like, “The House Rule I just invented means that the action you took before I invented this rule and told you about it was not the ordinary way of things, but a crime for which you are now in deep trouble.”
Is it interactive? It could be that as a story element the Bad Stuff is in fact A Gloriously Epic Trauma Conga Line, but if it’s all off-camera it’s insufferably frustrating, not fun.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most players who respond badly to bad stuff happening to their PCs have had experiences of unfair non-interactive bad stuff being used to shut them out of the game.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most players who respond badly to bad stuff happening to their PCs have had experiences of unfair non-interactive bad stuff being used to shut them out of the game.
And much like unhealed people entering the dating pool before they are ready, it is their responsibility to work that out so it isn’t causing them to lash out at others.
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@hellfrog Yep. But also note that making unfair and non-interactive bad shit happen to PCs is legit unfun. It’s their responsibility to work it out, and they don’t get free rein to lash out at people because of it. BUT regardless, the shitty thing about unfair non-interactive shit is that it’s unfair non-interactive shit. It wouldn’t be just fine if the mark would only shut up and pretend it’s fine.
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I voted for “just fuck me up,” because if I trust the GM, that’s generally where I’m at. I have a few absolute hard “nos” (and I have… even rped around one or two of them with a GM that I trusted) but generally speaking, the bad stuff happening to PCs is where a lot of the development comes from.
But like, I’m not a magical unicorn and if something bad happens to my PC that feels unearned or like it doesn’t belong in the story I’m sure I’ll still probably be upset.
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I want bad stuff to happen sooner rather than later, to see how the staff and community make it fun, because that’s going to be a great way to know whether or not the game is right for me.
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I love me some negativity consequences. I remeber a prp where Norwood was 100% sure he was doing the right thing by killing the bad guy. But since the fight had ended it ended up being viewed as straight up murder. I went “oh damn” to have my straight laced do-gooder suddenly having ‘murderer’ on his soul. It was awesome though because it spun a whole other prp where Norwood went on a redemption arc. It also made him more thoughtful of what was righteous. More gray, less black and white.
Or when K’vvan kept lipping off to leadership because he was an asshole and got eviserated. Led to massive RP chances and him slowly becoming an asshole that some people were okay with. He never did become someone people generally were chill with, but there was some growth.
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@junipersky I have no idea who these people are but these sound like very cool plots. That Norwood one is very neat and more consequences like that need to happen on games.
It always seems like there’s an overemphasis on wounding a character physically, where combat is going to be the thing that has the big negative consequences (speaking for WoD games mostly here), but it would be great to have more of those plots where the consequence is some kind of moral injury.
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What happens, happens. A roll of the dice - and my dice luck is legendarily horrific - or someone outplaying my character intellectually, politically, whatever. Bring it on, as long as the playing field is level. And as long as I’m allowed to come up with what happened because of a bad roll, botches are almost always some form of hilarious, because my characters often take themselves too seriously and I love the chance to poke a hole in that.
But when it’s not a fair playing field? When you wake up in the morning, log in and find out your character died while you were asleep for no reason? When your plot fails because staff doesn’t want their friend to be discomfited but you can go hang and they didn’t bother to mention that X won’t be changing in advance? When it’s written in the stars that you’re going to be the universe’s punching bag forever and always because you created what the source material says is absolutely normal? No. Not playing that game.
If the only real way to advance on a game is to TS a staffer’s alt, they can go fuck themselves because I’m not going to indulge them. If the only real way to succeed is to follow this nice set of rails, but no-one does me the courtesy of telling me they exist and I just have to kind of guess at what to do next and hope this is the right answer, I’m derailing myself right out of the game. Let my actions have consequences, and let me do things you haven’t foreseen. And if those consequences fuck me over sideways, as long as it’s all fair or I had some sort of chance, I’m happy with that. And if everything I do has no consequence at all, because the plot’s already written and all the roles are filled and that person over there is the shining hero who saves the world? No thanks.
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Damn!!!
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that last part read like something Liam Neeson should have been growling into a phone and now I feel like I missed something, lol.
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@Wizz Maaan I wish I felt like I missed something after reading that.
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@Evilgrayson said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
When you wake up in the morning, log in and find out your character died while you were asleep for no reason?
God I don’t even remember the circumstances but I know at least one person that happened to on Haven, and I remember thinking if it were me I would probably just… go on a multi-year rage hiatus from RP.
General +100 to the consensus of enjoying occasionally failing or losing or having terrible things happen so long as it feels like part of fun collaborative storytelling, not just torture porn or unsatisfying bad luck or impersonal griefing.
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I think permadeath should be wholly excluded from the Bad Things Bucket just because it’s so difficult to give a character death a satisfying amount of story lead up. Character deaths shouldn’t be a side note in someone else’s story, it should be part of a story explicitly dedicated to wrapping up your character in a respectful and awesome way.
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@Juniper I disagree that death should be entirely off the table, but I do think it should be intentional on the part of the player. An OOC check-in of “Hey now, if we keep going down this road, then death is very much a potential outcome” would be something I’d suggest, even if you’ve previously established that certain acts, areas, character types are more likely to provoke lethality.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily suit all game genres and types. To me, it probably suits a WoD game, or similarly mechanically driven game, than something like your high politicking Lords and Ladies game. Though I also disagree with the idea that character deaths should be solely dedicated to wrapping up a character in a respectful way. Awesome would be the ideal, sure, and it should serve the game’s story, but a death that’s inadvertent and unexpected IC is prime story fodder.
I can’t help but raise the death of Mollymauk in Critical Role’s Mighty Nein campaign as an excellent example of unexpected death impacting the story in a way that might have been unsatisfying and distressing to the player in that moment, but became foundational to the story as a whole.
ETA: But as with all high risk stories, you’d need a strong level of trust, rapport, etc, etc, etc.
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I am still of the opinion that players identify too closely with their characters in MU*s for most people to be divorced from feeling bad when bad things happen to them. I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Ominous said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
Everyone is John Dread,
You didn’t put a comma between Everyone is John and Dread and I immediately started looking for a strange new hybrid of two really cool games.
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@Ominous said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I am still of the opinion that players identify too closely with their characters in MU*s for most people to be divorced from feeling bad when bad things happen to them.
I probably agree with this, but I also don’t see it as a bad thing. It’s not a problem that needs solving, the intense OOC overreactions are, and certain kinds of people are going to have those reactions regardless of system.
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@Ominous said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:
I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John, Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.
hell yeah weird little story game recommendations!
Also check out Lovecraftesque, either Trophy Dark or Trophy Gold, any number of PBTA games but especially Apocalypse World itself, Pasión de Las Pasiones, Worldwide Wrestling, Brindlewood Bay, and Urban Shadows.
Each of those really takes a stab at an existing genre of RPG and shifts it into a different mechanism of storytelling. Urban Shadows is probably one of the closest analogues to World of Darkness, but really does something unique with regards to how organizations and play settings are created. Both Pasión de Las Pasiones and World Wide Wrestling seem silly on their face, but are surprisingly impactful to play (one is a game about telenovelas and the other about the lives of professional and semi-professional wrestlers). Trophy (any iteration) is great for examining our relationships to fantasy roleplaying games. You can make it as high or low fantasy as you want, but Trophy tends towards the gritty fantasy – it was described once as “if A24 made a D&D movie.” I also may or may not be suggesting Trophy Gold because I have a credit in it. Brindlewood Bay has probably the best mystery-creation-and-solving system I’ve encountered, but it also takes a “the game is a conversation” stance towards it. If you find that you like Brindlewood Bay, also check out the game Public Access,
Lovecraftesque is very similar to Everyone is John, but everyone plays a facet of a Lovecraftian protagonist, which is fun when bits of the psyche start getting warped by the mythos.
